We go to Washington, DC to speak with antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, founder of the group Peace of the Action, who has set up a camp near the Washington Monument calling on President Obama to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sheehan’s son Casey was killed while serving in Iraq on April 4, 2004. [includes rush transcript]

We spend the hour with world-renowned linguist and dissident, Noam Chomsky. In a wide-ranging public conversation at the Harvard Memorial Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Chomsky talks about President Obama’s foreign and national security policies, the lessons of Vietnam, and his own activism. "You just can’t become involved part-time in these things," Chomsky says. "It’s either serious and you’re seriously involved, or...

At least fourteen people have been killed and nearly sixty wounded in a string of attacks in Baghdad on the first day of voting in Iraq’s parliamentary elections. Iraq opened its polls on Thursday for early voting, including for hundreds of thousands of soldiers, police officers and prisoners. We speak to Nir Rosen, an independent journalist who has covered the Iraq war since 2003. [includes rush transcript]

Democratic Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania has died at the age of seventy-seven from complications after gall bladder surgery. He was the powerful chair of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. In 2002 Murtha voted to support the invasion of Iraq, but three years later he shocked many in Washington when he introduced a bill calling for the immediate withdrawal of US troops. [includes rush transcript]

Today a Democracy Now! exclusive report from Jeremy Scahill about a nine-year-old boy, shot in the head and killed by Blackwater in the infamous Nisoor Square massacre. His father, who is suing the private military contractor, provides the most detailed eyewitness account of the massacre to date. Scahill has conducted an in-depth investigation of the massacre and of nine-year-old Ali Kinani’s death. He files an exclusive report with Rick...

In an extended interview, award-winning journalist and activist Allan Nairn looks back over the Obama administration’s foreign policy and national security decisions over the last twelve months. "I think Obama should be remembered as a great man because of the blow he struck against white racism," Nairn says. "But once he became president...Obama became a murderer and a terrorist, because the US has a machine that spans...

A federal judge in Washington, DC has thrown out all charges against the five Blackwater operatives involved in the 2007 Nisoor Square massacre that killed seventeen Iraqi civilians. Judge Ricardo Urbina handed down his ruling late in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve. Urbina accused the Justice Department of building its case on sworn statements that the guards had given under a promise of immunity. We speak with attorney Scott Horton....

In Baghdad, the death toll from Sunday’s synchronized suicide car bombings has risen to 155. More than 500 people were also injured. It was the deadliest bombing in Iraq in two years. The blasts targeted the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Public Works and the Baghdad provincial government. Dozens of civil servants were among the dead. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki visited the site of the bombings and blamed al-Qaeda and...

The private military contractor Triple Canopy is at the center of a new controversy in Iraq. A twenty-five-year-old employee named Adam Hermanson died ten days ago after apparently being electrocuted while taking a shower in his living quarters at Triple Canopy’s base inside the Green Zone in Baghdad. Hermanson’s family is alleging Triple Canopy misled them about how he died, perhaps to cover up faulty electrical wiring at the...

War veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan came to Capitol Hill this month to testify before Congress and give an eyewitness account about the horrors of war. Like the Winter Soldier hearings in March 2008, when more than 200 service members gathered for four days in Silver Spring, Maryland to give their eyewitness accounts of the injustices occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan, "Winter Soldier on the Hill" was designed to drive home the...

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